i meant other types of captchas as well, but yes, cloudflare is fairly configurable. I also know other captchas can be more aggressive. And of course captchas can also block or harass “high privacy” configuration browsers and clients, and there’s also the strategy of infinite delay, where a captcha is never quite sure you’re really a human, so you have to work through 12 phases of it only to have to do the exact same thing again the next time you’re on the site. Recaptcha V3 with its “automatic” background captcha is also in a surprising amount of places you’d never know about unless you’re infected with some kind of The-Mainstream-Internet-Hates-You disease. Captchas discriminating against poor countries isn’t some big secret though, as far as I’m aware it’s fairly well known.

they also often prevent legitimate traffic from poorer countries, and aggressively so

I think you overestimate the average user

frequency does help a lot with a customer actually going through with a purchase, but really this is just another way for advertisers to spend more on the same ad spot, because now your competitors can screw you out of multiple opportunities instead of just one

why not use steam? I know steam has drm and isn’t free as in free speech, but it’s many times more practical. 2.0.8 is out now, and presumably there will be many updates a week for the foreseeable future, and updating by hand or with a script just to get a drm-free version in nixos seems a bit impractical to me.